So Happy Together, page 1
PRAISE FOR
SO HAPPY TOGETHER
“So Happy Together exposes disturbance beneath the surface of innocence and desire amid a group of college students during the tumultuous ‘60s. Twenty years later and with grit, humor, and compassion, a spirited Caro unpacks a past shadowed by secrets, unrequited passion, and the consequences of settling. This is a page-turning road trip story of a human heart coming to terms with brokenness and regret, not just once, but finally, and where the map gets drawn as we go.”
—JODI PALONI, author of They Could Live with Themselves
“Spoiler alert: no one is really happy together in So Happy Together. That’s because the road trip we join herein is about busting through such fantasies to get to self-actualization. And although perfect happiness may be elusive, along the way we do get candid, carnal exploration, as our exuberant narrator takers her “journey to parts unknown”—geographic and metaphoric. Bouncing back and forth between love beads and yuppie ‘80s trappings, loveless sex and sexless love, Shepherd’s novel is like sharing late-night gossip with a good friend.”
—ARIELLE GREENBERG, author of I Live in the Country & Other Dirty Poems
“Shepherd takes us on a literal ride into the not-so-distant past, remembering how naïve we were before we understood there are things you just can’t change—even if you’re destined, even if you’re soulmates, even if you’re willing to risk everything . . . some calls are louder than love . . . The reader will ache at the forced (and quite salty) sass of the young narrator, desperate to show it doesn’t hurt. And highly enjoy the ironic wit of the mature voice who knows better and goes for it all the same. A story for anyone who can relate to how we cling to a fantasy of the past to avoid committing to the present.”
—RITA DRAGONETTE, author of The Fourteenth of September
“Shepherd’s novel carries us on a journey many of us think of taking when we reach mid-life, when family responsibilities threaten to drown our creative selves. Who were we back in our vibrant youth? Can we recapture some part of that? I was captivated as the protagonist, Caro, sets off to find both her lost love and her identity as a youthful playwright and finds self-knowledge and joy in the process.”
—ELAYNE KLASSON, award-winning author of Love is a Rebellious Bird
SO
HAPPY
TOGETHER
Copyright © 2021, Deborah K. Shepherd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.
Published 2021
Printed in the United States of America
Print ISBN: 978-1-64742-026-0
E-ISBN: 978-1-64742-027-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020916344
For information, address:
She Writes Press
1569 Solano Ave #546
Berkeley, CA 94707
Interior design by Tabitha Lahr
She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.
All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
“Love in the Middle of the Air” and excerpt from “Love-Lust Poem” from Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright 2012 by The Estate of Lenore Kandel. Originally appeared in Word Alchemy, Grove Press, 1967. Reprinted by permission of North Atlantic Books.
“Most Like An Arch This Marriage,” from I Marry You, by John Ciardi, published by Rutgers University Press, copyright 1958. Reprinted with permission from Ciardi Family Publishing Trust.
For Henry
PROLOGUE
Tucson, Arizona, 1967
Peter never stuttered when he was on stage. Framed by a proscenium, he was as eloquent as Sirs Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, and Alec Guinness put together, and could vanquish those plosives and fricatives and bilabials like Hamlet dispatching his duplicitous mother and murderous stepfather with a thrust of his sword.
Offstage, Peter MacKinley (first name starting with a plosive, last name with a bilabial) couldn’t even introduce himself without grimacing and grunting and repeatedly pursing his lips. At first, it was painful to watch, but I got used to it. Except for that stuttering and his surprisingly wry sense of humor, you might not even notice he was there. He was a sweet, shy, soft-spoken, self-effacing, church-going college boy who blushed easily, was good to his mother, and rescued stray cats.
But somewhere between the green room and the wings, he transformed. It wasn’t just the makeup or the costume or the lights or all the theatrical abracadabra that I knew was just an illusion. It happened every time he stepped on stage. To me, he seemed broader and taller and more at home in his own skin. And did I mention brave? He didn’t just play the part, he was alive in it.
That blossom in my heart, I’ll fling to you—
Armfuls of loose bloom! Love, I love beyond
Breath, beyond reason, beyond love’s own power
Of loving! Your name is like a golden bell
Hung in my heart; and when I think of you,
I tremble, and the bell swings and rings—
‘Roxanne! Roxanne!’ . . . Along my veins, ‘Roxanne. . .’
Each night, I hovered in the wings and held my breath as he declaimed these words to my stage rival. Each night, he could have had me right then and there, on those floorboards, curtain up or down, audience be damned.
And then, after the bows and the adulation, the cold-creamed makeup removal and the costume change, swashbuckling Cyrano de Bergerac became sweet, shy, stuttering Peter MacKinley again.
I loved him in both his personas.
CHAPTER ONE
Westport, Connecticut, 1987
I don’t remember exactly when it started—it had been awhile since I’d given Peter much thought—but then, there he was, dropping by with increasing frequency and always at the most inconvenient moments, distracting me from one chore or another, until I had to shoo him away so I could get the kids to basketball practice or take my husband’s suits to the cleaners or put dinner on the table. I took his visitations as a sign of my unhappiness, until the nightmare, and after that, I knew there was more to it. I just knew he was in trouble. And so was I.
It was right out of the awful last scene of that Stephen King movie, Carrie, when Sissy Spacek’s bloody arm reaches up from under the ground to grab Amy Irving. Only this arm was skeletal, and it was Peter’s. I woke up screaming my head off, just like Amy, but I was in our bedroom and it was Jack who reached out to comfort me.
“Honey, what is it? Bad dream? Shh, shh. It’s alright. Everything’s alright.”
He wrapped his arms around me, still making those “shh, shh” sounds, and then started rubbing my back. And, against my better judgment, I snuggled into him for comfort. And he kept rubbing. “Shh, shh.” Rub. Rub. Rub.
And then, because my back is my second most erogenous zone, and despite the fact that I had not desired my husband for months, and he had pretty much given up on trying, we were there.
I knew Jack’s contours as well as I knew my own, maybe better, and we were moving to our bodies’ shared memory of so many years, so many couplings.
But it was Peter who made me come.
And once I had committed adultery in my heart, in my husband’s embrace, I knew it would only be a matter of time.
But the next morning, I started doubting myself. Maybe the bad dream was just another manifestation of the spring, summer, fall, and winter of my discontent? There was a simple way to find out. Peter’s number was indelibly printed on my brain. I could just pick up the phone and call him and ask him if everything was okay. Wait, no, I couldn’t, not after the life-altering debacle of our last time together in Tucson, not to mention it had been twenty years since I had laid eyes on him. He was probably fine, and I would look like some kind of idiot, still connected to him after all these years, despite everything I had learned. It would be humiliating and so painfully awkward. I wouldn’t know what to say. Neither would he. I would beat myself up for months afterwards (maybe forever), and I would still be stuck in my stultifying marriage and I just couldn’t bear it.
I put it out of my head and filled the empty space with plans for my father-in-law’s surprise sixty-fifth birthday party. But it was Peter who reminded me to order both a chocolate and a carrot cake, because my mother-in-law is allergic to chocolate. Uh uh, not taking dessert orders from someone who separated his Oreos and licked the icing before dunking the plain wafers in milk. And I rejected his ideas for redecorating my daughter’s bedroom. Pretty nervy of him, suggesting color schemes and telling me what kind of wallpaper to buy. Yeah, as if I would take the advice of someone whose apartment looked like it came straight from the pages of “Trends in Tacky Motel Décor, circa 1958.” I found Peter looking over my shoulder while I was leafing through garden catalogs for next spring’s perennials. He told me not to buy the rose bushes I was coveting beca
use they attracted Japanese beetles, and pointed out some stunning orange dahlias, instead. I had to tell him that here in the Northeast, dahlias were not technically perennials, that the tubers had to be dug up in the fall, stored through the winter, and then replanted in the spring, and stunning though they were, I didn’t have time for such labor-intensive flowers. He insisted that their beauty made them worth it. Easy for him to say.
And yet, and yet . . . I’d have given anything to have him here in the flesh, my partner in crime, just like he used to be.
I couldn’t call him, and I couldn’t live with his phantasmagoric presence. But I could call Ernesto. He would know. Once upon a time, Ernesto, his boyfriend Scott, Peter, and I were The Fabulous Foursome (not a rock group, but the best of friends). I had a hunch Ernesto would still be in contact with Peter.
“Hey, Caro, it’s been ages. How are you?”
“Fine, Ernesto. How about you?”
“All good here.”
And then there was a pause. He knew I hadn’t called six years after we’d last run into each other, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, to inquire about his health.
“Listen, I know this sounds weird, but I just have this feeling about Peter . . . I don’t know, Ernesto, I think he might be in some kind of trouble . . .”
There was a beat, and then another, before he answered.
“You know, I always thought you two had this deep, otherworldly connection, like you could read each other’s minds . . .”
“Oh, God, Ernesto, is he dead?”
“No, no, no, he’s not dead, Caro. Something did happen, but he’s okay now, or as okay as Peter ever was. I’m not being judgmental, we just all know Peter can’t be really okay until he . . .”
“Ernesto . . .”
“Oh, sorry. Look, I’m not sure he’d want me to tell you, but . . . he had a breakdown. Remember I told you when I saw you that I could see that coming? Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, he took pills, but then changed his mind. They pumped his stomach and then he signed himself into the hospital until they could stabilize him.”
“Oh my God!” My hands, which had been trembling since I’d picked up the phone, started shaking so hard I was sure Ernesto could hear my bracelets rattling, and I nearly dropped the receiver.
“Don’t worry, he’s out now and he’s on Wellbutrin and lithium, I think he said. Anyway, that’s allowed him to go back to work and everything. He certainly sounded better than the last time I talked to him a few months ago. But he’s not a happy camper, kiddo. You know, he’s still alone, still living in the middle of Nowheresville . . .”
I was crying and wiping my dripping nose on my sleeve so he wouldn’t hear me sniff, and then biting my lip so hard to keep myself from dissolving into big, heaving sobs.
“But, hey, we should get together sometime, Caro. Next time you’re going to be in the city, let me know.”
After we hung up, I remembered that I hadn’t asked about Peter’s mother. Well, Ernesto did say he was alone, so she must’ve died. But I couldn’t call him back to verify. I didn’t want him to know what I was thinking. He already pitied me for loving Peter so desperately back then. But he did give me the answer I was and wasn’t looking for: Peter still needed me.
So now I had the why. I just didn’t have the how. How could I come to Peter’s rescue when my life was here? Mothers don’t walk out on their children, no matter how loudly the siren song of a past love calls to them. Peter might need me, but my kids needed me more. Mothers don’t leave.
CHAPTER TWO
Patience is a virtue, but not one of mine. A couple of times over the next few months—no, more than a couple of times—I dialed Peter’s number, only to hang up as soon as the receiver was lifted at the other end, before he even had a chance to speak. It was creepy, I know, but I just wanted to make sure he was still alive. I don’t know what I would have done if the phone had rung on and on or if that message had come on that said the number was no longer in service. I am so antsy these days, like I just want to jump out of my skin and teleport myself somewhere else. I don’t know where. Just not here.
So, lately, in an attempt to self-soothe, I’ve taken to playing solitaire on the antique farmhouse table (lovingly refinished by a man I no longer love): endless rounds of meaningless games, cards turned over and over, well into the night. Sometimes, too tired to shuffle and set up the cards again, I cheat, turning over one or two cards instead of three.
The solitaire is a new distraction. I play to keep myself from fantasizing about Peter. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
Once in a while, when I want to feel productive, I do needlework. As I plot to leave my husband, I am pulling peach-colored thread through the canvas, cross-stitching a sampler that bears the legend:
Contentment is not the fulfillment of what you want,
but the realization of how much you already have.
But usually it’s solitaire, my drug of choice. And then, long after the children have finally turned out their lights, and hours after Jack has fallen asleep, I reluctantly tuck the worn blue deck into its vinyl slipcase and squirrel it away under the dishtowels in the kitchen drawer that no one ever opens but me.
Then I check the doors to make sure all is secure, flip the porch light on and off to scare away possible intruders, check (twice) that the burglar alarm is activated, unplug the TV and the toaster, lest an electrical fire consume the house and all its inhabitants while we sleep, hover over the children until I’m sure they’re breathing. I do all this to ward off some kind of divine retribution for what I am about to do, even though I don’t believe in God. Just hedging my bets. And then I check my hairline to see if my roots are showing.
Exhausted beyond the point of sleepiness, I crawl quietly into my marriage bed, as if I don’t belong there, fearful that the shifting of the mattress, the pulling up of covers could awaken Jack, who, forgetting we have not touched each other in months, might reach out to me.
Ever since that nightmare business last winter, I’ve thought of myself as a woman who deserves to be cheated on. I am always looking for clues. Each time Jack returns from a business trip and I’m sorting his dirty laundry, I bury my nose in his shirts, hoping I will sniff out Chanel No5, or Obsession, or even Jean Naté, that my nose will find the evidence I can’t see. But all I find are traces of his aftershave. It smells of bergamot and orange and rosemary, no girly notes of lilac or lily-of-the-valley or rose at all. I go through his pockets and fish out his credit card receipts: always dinners for one, with a glass or two of wine, never evidence of an expensive bauble purchased for a mistress. The truth is, I want him to hurt me in this way. If I did find something, I don’t think I would confront him. I’d just sit with my abject pain. And then maybe I could embrace the role of betrayed wife and justify my unannounced flight from domesticity. It won’t play out that way, though. I can’t be 100 percent sure, because God knows spouses have been known to stray, but Jack is such a straight arrow and so devoted to the children and, yes, to our happy family image. So, even though we’re not having sex, I would bet he’s not having it with anyone else, either. I am the obvious villain in this story.
Every day, I entertain at least two or three escape fantasies. Standing in the take-out line at the coffee shop, waiting to order my cappuccino, I think about making a caffeine-fueled all-night trip west, and then catch myself: Not tonight. It’s Tuesday, my turn to carpool my older son and his friends to swim team practice. And when I voice my opinion about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict or the Iran-Contra hearings, and Jack tells me all the reasons why my ideas are regurgitated from unsubstantiated sources, I will myself to the place where Peter thought everything that came out of my mouth was brilliant, and clever and original. But I don’t know if he’d think that today. Maybe he’d also tell me I’m trite. Maybe I am.
No one except me ever notices the smudgy circles under my eyes. It’s been years since I appeared at the breakfast table with a naked face. My husband, like some 1950s comic-strip denizen, eats his breakfast behind the Times, and then leaves for the train after depositing a perfunctory peck on my foundation-and-blush-covered cheek. The children are always embroiled in early morning squabbles, frantic searches for lost library books—“But it’s due today, Mom, and I’ll get detention if I have one more overdue book!”—stray sneakers—“They won’t let me play dodge ball without my sneakers!”—and matching socks and, finally, the twenty-five-meter dash to the school bus. Sometimes I catch my youngest, Caleb, eyeing me curiously. Sometimes I think he knows, though he never says anything but “I love you, Mommy,” as he gives me a quick, hard hug before he, too, is out the door.
